Abortion as a hot-button topic is nothing new. Witness the German playwright Friedrich Wolf's play Cyanide (Cyankali). It debuted in 1929 and was made into a movie the following year. The play was first performed at the Lessing Theater and became the biggest hit of the theater’s season. When it was made into a movie …
Category: TV-movie
Camping-Camping
In 1991, less than two years after the Berlin Wall came down, a film called Go Trabi Go hit the cinemas in Germany. It’s the story of a man, his wife, and their bored teenage daughter who—taking advantage of the newly available European West—drive to Italy in their trusty old Trabant. While the husband is …
The Night on the Autobahn
Right after the Wall was built, politicians were anxious to demonstrate that the Wall would have no effect on creative freedom, and that, if anything, it would protect the average person from the thieves and scoundrels who had been exploiting the porous border with impunity. Films from this period often addressed the Wall and why …
Marta, Marta
Every once in a while, a television movie comes along that becomes as much a part of media literacy as any feature film. It’s the one that everyone was talking about the next day at work and continued to talk about for years after. Think Duel, or Brian’s Song, or, if you’re from Britain, The …
Today is Friday
By 1989, Nina Hagen was well-known in West Germany, but few people there knew anything about her past. She was the operatic, punk demon lady from the far side of the moon spouting mystic mumbo-jumbo and singing like nobody else. Then the Wall fell (Mauerfall) and we Westerners saw a whole other side of her—the …
East German Cinema Blog 